Reader Question #3 – Time

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“Sometimes, I know things days before they happen. How do I do that?”

To understand the answer to this question, you have to know that time is a construct we have created to organize, or better yet, pair down reality into smaller and more tangible doses.

Time is not something that existed before we needed it to understand reality.

So, what is time a construct for? Blips in the ‘verse I call “Awareness Segments”. Please note that I am intentionally leaving out the important and very closely related topics of Space and Oneness.

An Awareness Segment is an instance of everything you are aware of. Even if we were to define this as one-millionth of a second, how many words would it take you describe everything you are aware of in everything perceived by your 9-12 senses, for everything within viewing, hearing, considering, feeling distance…

It is an absurd amount of information. In fact, your brain has built the remarkable ability to filter by importance and forget what doesn’t rank high enough as to not get overwhelmed.

Let’s take a step back in this explanation….

Imagine you have a deck of cards. These are kept in a stack, all conveniently in one spot.  But although you know that the deck contains 52 cards, you only see the face of the one on the bottom.  You have to count them out to be sure there is actually 52. And how do you feel about how well you know your cards in a game like Euchre (5 card hand) versus War (26 card hand)?

You quickly see that it becomes more difficult to be fully aware of each card, the more there are.

But it is still very possible to set each unique card out on the floor, and be aware of all 52 at the same time.  Imagine that the deck of cards had 1,326 unique cards in it… This is harder to hold awareness of.

Now imagine that each card, instead of being a simple combination of color, number, and symbols, it is an Awareness Segment.

I believe this example does a good job at illustrating why we created the construct of time. With so much information on a single card, how can we do anything more than look at a single card at one time, and then flip to the next when we feel ready?

This, however, does tell tales of the falsity of time. As quantum physics shows us that people don’t agree on the amount of time an event takes, nor do they agree about the amount of time between events. How quickly time is perceived is completely dependent on how quickly they are flipping through their decks. The truth of the matter is, all Awareness Segments exist in the same instance. We just cannot yet perceive them in the same instance.

So to answer the question directly, you or someone with whom you speak can perceive more than one Awareness Segment at once, therefore, they can tell you about a card that you have not yet flipped to.

And truth be told, this is not so far fetched.  Our brains are built to slowly perceive more information, when we are ready. This is the easiest to see in babies.

For the sake of ending this post today I will give only one example. Object Permanence.

After a baby is born, and after they are aware of you, you only exist to them, when they are aware of you. If you walk away, and they can neither see nor hear you, you no longer exist to them. Between the age of 6 – 9 months, a baby has developed enough of their brain to be able to retain the information that you can exist, even if they don’t see you.  Their brain has developed enough to deal with the amount of information they have, and is ready for more, so it starts maintaining that extra information; which is you.

Your brain is protecting you from further awareness because it has a hard time coping with the knowledge with each Awareness Segment, before it accepts it all, processes it, and you flip a card.

Further Reading (as you have no reason to believe my physics claims):
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/07/humans-have-a-lot-more-than-five-senses/
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time
http://www.iflscience.com/physics/your-future-set-stone-spacetime

Interesting article that talks about Music, Astrophysics, and the Quechua people. Not to mention, some conversation about Pachamama being referred to as More than Mother Earth, but Mother Space/Time:
https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/intergalactic-pachamama-kichwa-cosmology-vs-western-astrophysics